He could tell his father was fighting to hold
back tears. He could feel his own pouring hot
onto his shirt collar.
The crows.
He felt rage climbing the tendons of his neck.
He grimaced and clenched his fist. They had
gotten his mother, and soon they would come for
him. They would not stop until his entire family
was dead. They had caused his mother’s cancer
with the malicious microbes they carried in their
beaks. The gene-damaging microbes had made
their way through her eye socket and into her
brain. Perhaps it was telepathy or nodules unique
to the brains of crows which emanated harmful
waves causing human cells to reproduce erratically. Jimmy never attempted to pin down exactly
what the crows did or intended to do. To him, it
was all of the above.
He hung up on his father without a word of
goodbye and nodded at Edwin, signaling that he
was done using the phone.
Back in his room, he continued to draw, label,
outline and sketch, trying to decipher all the patterns and algorithms that constituted the entities
to which the English language had attributed the
word ‘crows.’ These were not God’s creatures. Not
even Satan could cook up such a beast. They had
to be the work of Sokar, the whale entity whose
purpose was to rend humanity’s Creator to the
bone and nullify all of existence. He pictured a
black cauldron tended by Sokar and his council of
mutants. The cauldron was frothing with bubbles,
only the bubbles were eggs and the eggs were
hatching, releasing a million more squawking
abominations into the light of day. He envisioned
a crimson sky filled with their black shapes: a
backdrop for the blowing of trumpets of Judgment Day. He imagined himself integrated with
the bark of a dead oak tree as they tore his face
apart with their talons and beaks.
“Bring it on, bitches!” he hollered.
Several staff people’s heads turned at once towards his door.
“Bring it oooooooonnn!”
In a millisecond, Edwin was at the door.
“Jimmy, are you okay in there?” he asked,
knocking.
“Yes!” Jimmy laughed. “I’m okay.” He dragged
himself over to his bed and fished a plastic bag
out from between the edge of the mattress and
the wall. The bag was filled with dead birds. The
birds had manifested from the darkest corner
of the ceiling last night and Jimmy had speared
them with a pencil. He dumped the birds onto a
diagram of the Pentoculon, Sokar’s chariot, which
he drawn on hundreds of sheets of loose leaf
paper held together by duct tape. The five eyes of
the top-like Pentoculon were labeled mind, soul,
heart, wings and beak. He placed a bird carcass on
each eye.
“In fact,” he reached into his underwear and
retrieved a shard of a broken CD, “I’m more than
okay.” He sliced the palm of his hand and let
the blood drip onto each of the dead birds. “I’ll
never have to fear them again.” He grinned. “I’ve
discovered their secrets, Edwin. They can’t kill me
now. I’m invincible!”
“Jimmy, you’re not trying to hurt yourself, are
you?”
“No way, man! I’m free from their curse! I’m
unstoppable!” He stepped back, turned around,
lowered his head, and with his newfound
strength, crashed through the window.
Three staff people including Edwin, burst into
the room, but it was too late.
The dead birds on the top diagram startled
them, but they quickly noticed that the window
had been broken.
Edwin yanked his walkie-talkie out of its holster.
“Brooklodge, this is Edwin over in 4-D. We
have an AWOL code red. Repeat, a patient is
AWOL. Twenty-one year old Caucasian male, six
foot one, brown hair has gone AWOL.”
“Copy that. 4-D. We’ll set up a perimeter,” said
the garbled voice on the other end of the walkie.
After fifteen minutes of searching, they finally
found Jimmy near the volleyball court. He had
stripped naked and was flapping his arms and
squawking at groups of crows and other birds.
It wasn’t long before they converged upon